Improving quantitative literacy through a general education acoustics course

Most Colleges and Universities have some form of quantitative reasoning requirement for graduation. A narrow view of this requirement is that students need to do some mathematics in the course to demonstrate some facility at calculating quantities. Additionally, students often discuss their discomfort with mathematics when discussing their anxiety about registering in a non-majors physics course. In this presentation, I will discuss strategies used in a musical acoustics course for non-science majors to address proportionalities, graphical representations, and approximations to help students get past equations to think about the underlying physical relationships. Often, I find that students actually are much better at using mathematics than their self-assessments. By giving students different contexts for mathematical thinking, the quantitative elements make more sense to them and calculations become less intimidating. The examples I will discuss focus on using classroom-based experiments to identify relationships between dependent and independent variables on topics such as musical scales, simple oscillators, and fourier analysis.